Planet Sick-Boy: http://www.sick-boy.com "We Put the SIN in Cinema"
© Copyright 2003 Planet Sick-Boy. All Rights Reserved.
A lot of people have questioned Michael Moore's motives for his "creative manipulation" of events in the Oscar-winning Bowling For Columbine. If you're bothered by that kind of thing, wait until you get a load of Stevie, the new documentary by Steve James, the director of won-every-award-but-the-Oscar blockbuster Hoop Dreams. It's hard to watch and not think James is exploiting his subject, especially when his voiceover whines about his own bizarre, guilt-fueled agenda.
We all have our own preconceptions about rural folk (a/k/a crazy, shit-kickin' hillbillies), be they the anti-hero of Beck's "Truckdrivin' Neighbors Downstairs (Yellow Sweat)," the Beatty-rapists in Deliverance, or our own revenge-obsessed president, but we never really learn what makes them tick...until now, that is. When he was done with Dreams, James returned to Pomona, Illinois, where he served as a Big Brother advocate during his years of graduate school at Southern Illinois. His ward was Stephen Fielding, who James had always thought of as "an accident waiting to happen," so it isn't much of a surprise to see his subject on crutches upon his arrival.
First, some background on Fielding: He was born out of wedlock, and after beating him as an infant, his mother dumped him off to be raised by his step-grandparents. Fielding eventually went through every foster home and state institution in the area, where he was abused even more. He's like a cross between Billy Bob Thornton's Jacob Mitchell (from A Simple Plan) and David Cross's Ronnie Dobbs, with a barely visible face hidden behind a beard, giant glasses and a Harley Davidson baseball hat.
After hanging with Fielding for a bit, James eventually hightails it back home (to make Prefontaine - the dumb Jared Leto version, not Without Limits with Billy Crudup). Two years later, James catches wind of Fielding's incarceration for molesting an 8-year-old cousin he was babysitting. What follows is James's painstaking look at Fielding's criminal troubles, which plays out like a Jerry Springer puppet show with the filmmaker as the string-pulling enabler. Maybe his intentions were far different than they appear, because James comes off as self-centered, cold and almost painfully unobjective. It was an 8-year-old!
If you can get past that, and the 144-minute running time, Stevie is still a pretty tough sell. It would be easy to say the film would be much more tolerable had it been 90, 60, or even 20 minutes, but that would in no way make it any less difficult to watch. Can you deal with a subject who really deserves to be locked up? A subject whose own friends and family never once doubt his guilt, nor seem particularly surprised or upset (aside from the molested kid's mom)? A subject whose mentally challenged fiancée often seems to be the moral compass of the film (aside, of course, from the decision to stick with Fielding through thick and thin)? A subject from whom you can practically smell the body odor, rancid Budweiser and stale Marlboros? A subject who's about as far as you can get from the plucky little heroes of the feel-good spelling bee documentary Spellbound?
But here's the thing: I did kind of like it. That doesn't mean I'm recommending it, however. I liked Stevie in the same way I love watching Big Brother and every other crappy reality show on television (I'm sure I would have been riveted to the sadly and recently quashed Beverly Hillbillies spoof). And since I understand that a lot of people have issues with that type of entertainment, consider yourself warned.
2:24 - Not Rated
========== X-RAMR-ID: 35155 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1168591 X-RT-TitleID: 1121564 X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146 X-RT-RatingText: 6/10
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews